Info for collectors and enthusiasts of rugs from Afghanistan

Category Archives: The War

The Pentagon says American airstrikes in Somalia have killed no civilians since President Trump accelerated attacks against Shabab militants there two years ago.

Amnesty International investigated five of the more than 100 strikes carried out in Somalia since 2017 by drones and manned aircraft, and in just that small sampling found that at least 14 civilians were killed.

The Pentagon says airstrikes by the American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State killed at least 1,257 civilians in Iraq and Syria as of the end of January.

Airwars, a university-based monitoring group, estimates that those strikes killed at least 7,500 civilians in those countries.

Those disparities show how poorly the American public understands the human cost of an air war fought largely by remote-controlled drones. Drones have been the main weapon in the counterterrorism fight for more than a decade. They kill extremists without risking American lives, making combat seem antiseptic on the home front. But the number of civilians killed in these attacks is shrouded in secrecy.

War rug art is fascinatingly educational friends! Temple University’s Samuel L. Paley Library, in room 309, is currently holding a Afghan war rug exhibition that contains 14 of my Afghan war rugs. These rugs tell stories and contain history which, ” helps contextualize a group of people that many Americans know very little about.” Theirs so much to be learned and talked about. Go check it out!

This show has curated by Alicia Cunningham-Bryant and student assistant curators, Ilana Napoli, and Rachel Morin.

Warrug.com recently received a shipment of rugs from Peshawar, Pakistan including some new designs woven in Pakistan. The weavers are Afghan Turkmen who have settled permenantly in Pakistan after being refugees. This summer they produced three rugs featuring Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s or drones).

“The anonymous weavers of six 1980s and 1990s-era “war rugs” — carpets whose motifs include land mines, guns and soldiers — may have had no formal training, learning from their relatives, but they have incorporated the grim realities of life in a war zone into their traditional craft.”

Tribesmen began battling the foreigner militants they had previously sheltered early last month after the foreigners tried to kill a tribal leader.

“The people in South Waziristan have risen against the foreigners. They have killed about 300 of them and they get support from the Pakistan army, they asked for support,” Musharraf told a military conference on global counter-terrorism in Islamabad.